I turned to Dax.
He was awake. He was always awake when I was — the breathing, which he tracked without trying to, meant that my wakefulness was his. He was lying on his side looking at me in the dark and he had been, probably, thinking his own version of the two-in-the-morning thoughts.
"The next thirty years," I said.
He waited.
"I know what I want them to look like," I said.
"Tell me," he said.
So I told him. Not the version I had given on the Sunday in March, which had been the response to his shape — which had been the answer to the right question, complete and true. This was the version I'd arrived at on my own, in the fourth-night quiet, from the inside.
The desk at fifty. Nora Langford growing up in this pack and causing the productive trouble she was clearly destined to cau
